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GNOME 3.8 Is Dropping Its Fallback Mode

11-09-2012, 10:10 AM

Phoronix: GNOME 3.8 Is Dropping Its Fallback Mode

Matthias Clasen on the behalf of the GNOME Release Team has announced that they have decided to eliminate GNOME's "fallback mode" with the upcoming 3.8 release that allowed a "GNOME classic" mode that didn't depend upon OpenGL/3D rendering and was more like the GNOME2 traitional desktop...

IMO, it's a positive sign that the GNOME fellows are going for better quality regarding their vision of an fancy 3D accelerated desktop (similarly to Unity).
Users who like the traditional efficient interface (a taskbar allowing to switch to any application anytime with a single click) have great options like lxde and xfce.
They are truly mature desktop environments:
- very stable due to multiple years of bugfixes
- customizable
- efficient resource usage (memory footprint, gpu)
- proven desktop model for the Desktop user

Those who like the fancy and shiny new stuff should go Unity, GNOME and they pay certain price in terms of perhaps more bugs and certain resource requirements (e.g. GPU).
There's enough goodness left for those who stick with the more traditional UI.

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I agree. People who want shiny stuff, should be able to afford more CPU/GPU usage.
Its not fair on devs to continue spending more and more time to make old things shiny while using the same resources as old.

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i have a ~3 year old netbook, with a 945GME. this chipset can only do textures up to 2048x2048. so it can't render a composited desktop if i plug in a second monitor and arrange it to the side. 32bit intel atom is not exactly what LLVMpipe is designed for.

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Gnome (as well as KDE and Unity) guys are still working towards modern desktop (fully hw-accel, composing GUI), while many opponents even don't know what they are saying!

And they only care about users ready to use their interface, whatever this is, and they do software for them, only them.
This is not necessarily something negative, but once a day gnome was something else and people take time to adapt.
Perhaps in Gnome OS the proprietary GPU drivers will be automatically installed to provide you with the best gnome experience, why not ? Evidenty there will be many opponents...